Lurking in your dreams: Is the unconscious good or bad

I am surprised, … well, not any more, about how many people have misgivings on account of myths about the unconscious.

Is the unconscious good or bad? This is a question I see lurking in the back of many dreamers. Not only you who are concerned with working with your dreams, but also people in general who wonder why should they work with their own psyche.

This is often all right, but very often too it creates so many doubts that prevent people from learning about themselves, from connecting in a richer and deeper way with their own unique meaning and purpose.

The following from Carl Jung is something I would like to share with my readers here:

“We are living so much in our personal psychology, in personal relations, in personal projections – we are so linked and cemented with human society – that we cannot perceive or conceive of anything impersonal [the archetypal experience].

Let us assume that people are quite ready to have archetypal experiences, that it really happens to them to perceive something of the objective working of the unconscious, and lets us assume that it is so, then that ancient question is put again: is it the powers of the air, of the water, of the earth, of the fire – in other words, is it an elementary power? Or is it the Holy Ghost?

Now, inasmuch as it is evident that an archetype is operating – which in itself means nothing more than that nature is operating – this is neither good nor bad. It can be quite demoniacal and it can be quite good – generous and marvellous It is morally indifferent.

It is like a tree full of fruit: the tree lets the fruit fall and you pick it up and say how good the tree is. But the next year it has not fruit at all; you might die of starvation under that tree: it is just nature.

And thus the archetypes are simply the functioning of natural elements of the unconscious, neither good nor bad. Inasmuch as we need nature, we need the life of the archetypes – it is quite indispensable. ”